Category: xml

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Share Your OPML

I am not sure why people are getting excited over share your OPML; this seems like yet another vanity/popularity service that will soon attract spammers and other bottom dwellers much like Google Page Rank did. It is definitely attracting the attention of those who see it as a marketing tool (sorry, I mentioned bottom dwellers already).

I can get excited about someone that truly implements a relevance system for my OPML or RSS reading habits. I define relevance as presenting me with things that I want to read based on what I read, not on someone else’s notion of popularity. I really, really don’t care what is popular, I do care about what is important to me — it’s that simple. And I can’t imagine that I am alone in that feeling. Sadly, only the dearly departed Searchfox has come the closest to implementing this.

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Patent on XML?

Cnet has a story about how a small company is claiming via US patents 5,842,213 and 6,393,426 filed in 1997 that they own the rights to XML and intend to ‘monetize’ it.

How did this ever get approved? Did no one in the US Patent Office know of SGML? When I was working at the Environmental Protection Agency in the late 80’s there was a fair amount of EPS-generated documentation that existed in SGML. This definately can’t stand up to the ‘prior art’ challenge.

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Semantic MediaWiki Implementation

I was interested to learn that enhancements to Wiki are being formulated to allow for the inclusion of semantic annotation of articles.

Wiki has proven itself to be an effective means of collecting information (look no further than the wikipedia). Coupling something like wikipedia with a means of being able to make machine readable sense of the collected knowledge is a pretty potent combination.